Peter Tombrowski dislikes the banner of Environmentalist Champion; he recoils a little as we discuss the impact of his first film Going To Costco and Ikea Without A Car on the recent environmental renaissance.

By: Kindah Mardam Bey

Peter Tombrowski dislikes the banner of Environmentalist Champion, in fact, he recoils a little as we discuss the relevancy of his first film Going To Costco and Ikea Without A Car on the recent environmental renaissance. You see, Peter and his wife Andrea have not had a car since 1998 and it is only now that people are thinking this couple are environmentally conscious citizens. However, when they originally decided to get rid of their primary mode of transportation the response was less than kind. Almost a decade later Peter and Andrea Tombrowski have lived in Calgary (Alberta, Canada) one of the most sprawling cities in Canada, have wrote a book on their experiences without a car called Urban Camping and have made a short film based on the subject. At this years Hot Docs in Toronto, Tombrowski’s film was part of the official selection. Sandwiched between the infamous Costco and Ikea, Peter Tombrowski and I sat in a Tim Hortons and discussed his book, his film and the issue of being an environmental champion. According to Tombrowski, we are a society of individuals who lack imagination, and that is a more urgent problem then ecological dissent.

Peter Tombrowski and his family left Poland when he was twelve and since then he has lived for the most part of twenty three years in Calgary. When he immigrated and eventually resided in Calgary it was a population of 450,000. Today the city has doubled in population in large part to the oil boom reminiscent of the Middle Eastern oil boom some sixty years ago. Houses aren’t being built fast enough for the population growth, and families generally investing in two vehicles per household are making traffic control a problem at the forefront of city building concerns. So why isn’t Peter Tombrowski’s film being showed at every opportunity and his speaking schedule being booked solid? Perhaps change, although inevitability has become a necessary evil that no one wishes to be the first in line for?

The Tim Horton’s that we meet in is close to Tombrowski’s home of course. He tells me that where we are sat did not exist a few years ago, all the area around us was industrial or open fields. Now it has Ikea, Costco, Superstore, and about five dozen other product chains vying for consumer dollars. With all the movement, spending and basic consumerism, why has the Tombrowski’s not bought into the hype?

Tombrowski is a cabinet maker by trade, but he and his wife live by their own set of rules, so they alternate working. Currently Andrea is working and Peter is taking care of the children, making films and home educating. I want to know about Peter Tombrowski’s decision to put his choice to walk where he could and take transit where he couldn’t walk, onto film for others to analyze. Tombrowski explains ‘This is my first documentary, but it is 30 years worth of dreaming for me. I always wanted to make movies. This was confluence; everything seemed to come together to make it happen right now. It is self initiated, self financed. It was initially a forty minute documentary, but felt I wanted to say everything I could do in five minutes. The inspiration was to put my documentary set to a classical piece of music. I had to find a piece of classical music I didn’t pay royalties on. Then I made the film without dialogue and the classical music was the mood of the film. In a way, I had decided to make a documentary music video of sorts.’

So Tombrowski was born to make films, but his inspiration for Going To Costco And Ikea Without A Car was a SAAB car commercial from the 1980s of all ironic reference points. Peter tells me that the commercial is set to the Antonin Dvorak's Slavonic Dance in C where a mechanic acts like a symphonic conductor, and the cars are being unloaded in a very coordinated, almost orchestral way to show off the precision of the car like an instrument used for a symphony. Tombrowski says that the car commercial was such a beautiful visual experience for him that he was inspired to give people back in a way that inspired him. He wanted that desire to buy a SAAB car the commercial was relaying to equal the feeling of walking as a choice. An entire University paper could be wrote on the significance of using a car commercial as a template for exploring the idea of environmentally sound choices through the medium of a film. Tombrowski set his film to the same piece of music, ultimately.

In finding out about the film, I still was unclear as to the why. If Tombrowski wasn’t looking to make a film promoting environmentalism, then what was he doing making a film about walking? He seemed to have an easy answer for that, and it started with his and Andrea’s book Urban Camping. ‘This is a self published book; I made the first 80 by hand myself. Whenever I was at Costco and loading groceries into my jogger, people would stop and ask me questions. What are you doing that for? Where are you going? Didn’t I see you walking down here earlier? When I explained that I would walk to Costco, load up my jogger with groceries and walk back home, 99 times out of 100 people would say ‘I don’t know how you do that.’ This meant two things; firstly people literally didn’t know how I could haul the groceries and do all that walking. Secondly that statement would mean that doing the walking and grocery shopping was incomprehensible to them. The book was a way to explain my way of living to people who wanted to understand.The book is simply and outline and a description of our life. The same is true of the film.’

True to his word, Urban Camping is simply that. A non-judgemental description of how he and his family live their lives in an imaginative way. The book outlines a few examples of walking trips. One is about the time they bought a microwave and had to take it back to the store. Getting the microwave home on the first trip was an arduous task, but returning it and getting another was even worse. This type of journey and lengthy process is not a problem or a task to complain about for Peter, but it is an example of a lesson he learned about purchasing larger items and being sure at the store before he left it with his product. ‘I wanted my first film to be something I knew a lot about and something intimately tied to my life. My family are complimented and cursed for our walking, it makes us unique.’

Tombrowski does the trip down to Costco and/or Ikea once or twice a week. It takes him thirty five minutes to get there, and 40 minutes back as the return voyage is uphill and with groceries.When he takes his kids, they go down in the jogger to grocery store but then the kids walk back so the groceries can be in the jogger, which takes about an additional twenty minutes. I said to Tombrowski that people would say this is cruelty to children, his response is logical. ‘When I went to Poland last year, for the first time since leaving at the age of twelve, what I noticed most, was that everyone was walking or biking. Of course it can be smaller distances in a small country like Poland, but I realized it is our limitations in our mind that stops us in North America, not the distances. The walking my family and I do is exceptional for here, for now, but it is not an exceptional thing that we are doing.’

In fact, Tombrowski seems to have logical thought in spades. As he speaks about people driving somewhere that takes him three or four minutes to walk, I am reminded of my small town where across the road at one point a family of young males lived. They were constantly going for a ‘beer run’ and would do so eight or twelve times over a weekend night. I couldn’t help but laugh as the beer store was three blocks away. Tombrowski isn’t anti-car; he recounts a family trip to Banff where they rented a car. The problem with cars in North America Tombrowski points out ‘is that we have an unhealthy dependency…an addiction at this point for cars. Why drive what would take five minutes to walk?’ When you think of driving as an addiction or a dependency, one might be inclined to realize we can’t actually give up the remote control to the TV, let alone the vehicle addiction!

Why are people so dependent? What went wrong I ask Tombrowski? He then decides to become ‘philosophical’ as he puts it ‘People relegate their imagination to home décor and clothing instead of using imagination as a way to solve life problems. People in history had to be very imaginative in order to survive, but now we buy solutions like cars and now we depend on being sold a solution. No one is selling walking. I can walk on a sidewalk and either way that I look, the sidewalk is empty. For twenty minutes I will not see another walker on the sidewalk. We think of ‘going for a walk’ as somewhere you have to drive to, unhaul the kids and then enjoy a leisurely walk in some designated wilderness.’

It is from this imagination that Tombrowski has managed to make his life a starting point for conversation. ‘We are not environmentalists by nature, this lifestyle is simply a choice to live differently, be less dependent on cars, and live cheaper. If cars were environmentally sound, this would not even be a question. No environmental agenda to it, but now we see the environmental benefits of that choice now. We see that we take a very European perspective, as they are naturally more environmentally sound by their lifestyles and not so much by an agenda. We think that way too. We decide to be more environmentally sound because we make conscious choices, we don’t just buy disposable diapers because we have children. We decide if that is the best decision for our family first.’

So how do you go towards an imaginative life? How does one watch Tombrowski’s film and then decide to live in a more imaginative way? After all, a large leap is required between intent and action. ‘I see politics, I don’t see vision. Governments aren’t affecting change in ways that might upset people in the short term and make people uncomfortable for a small period of time, so that the environment and people in general, can reap benefit overall. Political parties have to make voters happy in order to get in the next term. So it is up to the individuals to make choices as politicians won’t. When we sold the car we had to have imagination in order to survive. That is the ‘out of the box’ thinking that everyone speaks of. You have to step outside of the box in order to find out how imaginative you can actually be. No one complimented us on our new way of living when we made the change, no one said ‘trailblazers! Good for you!’ What we did receive was a lot of condemnation and angry comments. People don’t want to live an individuals’ life as it can be pointed at, observed and commented on.’

Tombrowski’s words may seem harsh and over idealized, but he seems to be a person who has learned these thoughts of his through experience. ‘One of my core beliefs is that I live in this world and have to work within that world. I have respect for the oil industry and plastic products, but I think we can use our resources and live our lives in different ways to avoid that desperate dependency and addiction to those resources. As a society we are grazers, like cows, something new comes on the market and we consume it; Playstation III, Wee, IPod, etc. Now I make a choice whether I will consume a product based on merit, it is up to others whether they want to do the same.’ Whether Tombrowski is an environmentalist, a trailblazer, that weird guy at Costco who walks all the time, or simply an individual, he does appear to be on thing for sure now….a filmmaker with a voice.

Film Review at AnEVibe - Going To Costco And Ikea Without A Car

Book Review at AnEVibe - Urban Camping